Yuppies Recycling `50s Greed

May 12, 1985|By Erica Jong, Special to the News/Sun-Sentinel

Around the time the `70s turned `80s, those of us who had access to the printing presses were constantly asked to pontificate for the public prints on what the new decade meant. The `60s had begun in relative quietude, only to turn lurid at the latter part of the decade when the Vietnam War, the women`s movement, student revolution, the Woodstock generation and the hippie drug explosion assaulted the public consciousness.

Perhaps the mass of America still looked, talked and thought like Phil Donahue`s old Chicago audiences (those chunky, redoubtable housewives in their ill-fitting polyester pantsuits), but on the surface -- the media surface, that is -- it appeared that America (or Amerika, as Abbie Hoffman styled it) was going to the moon (or to the dogs, depending on your point of view).

The early `70s were, culturally, an extension of the late `60s. When my first book of poems, Fruits & Vegetables, was published in 1971, I was declared, ex post facto, a flower child of the `60s (though to my mind I was nothing of the sort, since I had been writing sonnets at Barnard and Columbia grad school for a good part of the decade). And when my first novel, Fear of Flying, appeared in 1973, that flower child image was reinforced. Americans have this need to label their decades and their cultural spokespersons (to use a `60s-turned-`70s term) -- however inexact that labeling may be.

As the `70s wore on (and wear is certainly the operative verb here), it became apparent that revolution could not, by its very nature, be a constant state, and disillusionment began to set in. By 1977 or so, those of us who got polled on these mythical media matters found ourselves being asked whether the women`s movement ``had peaked,`` whether the sexual revolution ``had run out of steam,`` whether ``pot was passe.`` Surely a new decade of media hype was in the wind, though its particular flavor had not made itself known.

The `70s were almost over and nobody knew how to label them yet. Journalistic panic set in. Though it was clear that health food, fitness and acquisitiveness had replaced political consciousness, feminism and peace- mongering, the `70s remained an amorphous decade, still clinging to dregs of the `60s (sexual revolution, for example), not yet betraying its own unique character. By 1979, when the new decade loomed, things were still equivocal.

In `79, I was asked to write an article on ``The Heartthrob of the `80s,`` the styles of masculinity that would come into fashion after the hippie- student-radical of the `60s and the ``new sensitive male`` of the `70s had gone the way of all fads.

I predicted a return to macho, a heartthrob of the `80s who looked like James Dean: short hair, beautiful, sensitive face with incipient violence underneath, old-style macho masculinity grafted onto new-style post-feminist sensitivity. I came up with a composite male, who mirabile dictu looked exceedingly like the not-yet-discovered Sean Penn! How did I know? I am not a major psychic, but I do observe the American tendency to declare things in and out of fashion in ever shorter cycles. If the man of the `60s and `70s was a wimpy long-hair, the man of the `80s would have to be a macho short-hair -- with a difference. So fashion (and the world) turns.

This little journalistic jeu d`esprit aside, it was still not clear in 1979 where the decade dance was going. Then came a bellwether of sorts: an Op Ed piece in The New York Times by none other than the grand pink dragon of romance, Barbara Cartland, declaring a return to virginity.

``Virginity?`` I asked incredulously. Virginity was what we all had so gratefully gotten rid of in the `60s. But a sager soul than me, a very wise woman friend in her 70s, said to me:

``When you read about virginity on the Op Ed page of the Times, look forward to a revival of Kinder, Kirche, Kuche (children, church, kitchen), `barefoot and pregnant` and the decline of women`s rights. The economy is bad; there aren`t enough jobs for men, so women will be told their proper place is in the kitchen again.`` Well, it didn`t happen exactly as my friend predicted, but certain elements of her prediction did come true.

As the economy went from bad to worse, sexual revolution appeared to go out of style, and chastity (for both sexes) was being touted by the media. Those perennial interviewers interviewed a few of their closest friends (or favorite pub pundits) and reported that so many people were ``burned out`` by the sexual revolution they were not ``doing sex`` at all. Instead, they were jogging, buying Cuisinarts and drinking Perrier.